What kind of homicide investigation is this, anyway? It’s perfectly understandable when public officials closely guard information in a sensitive, ongoing case. However, certain aspects of the Jessica Chambers murder mystery in rural Courtland, Mississippi point to a shocking combination of incompetence, indifference, frustrating evasiveness, and plain old C.Y.A. lying by those in charge.

District Attorney John Champion says they are expectantly awaiting results of forensic lab tests and subpoenas, while they go back over everything they have so far — but that all they have in terms of leads in the case are, in his words, “unfortunately, one dead-end after another.”

We begin at the wooded roadside scene of an apparent immolation murder, the 19-year-old white female victim having been found burned over 98% of her body and clinging to life next to her car which was completely engulfed in fire.

The local volunteer fire chief, Cole Haley, says he received notification at 8:13 pm that night, December 6th, of a fully-involved car fire off to the side of Herron Road. Haley said “the tone came down” — that is, he received a signal about the burning car while he was on his way back to his station from responding to an earlier house fire. He and other first responders found Jessica Chambers still alive when they immediately arrived at the scene to extinguish her car.

By the most reliable accounting, about forty-seven minutes later, at around 9:00 pm, a tow truck hauling the victim’s burned-out car pulls into a nearby gas station/convenience store (an apparent hangout for local criminal gang members) so the tow driver can stop to buy cigarettes and “get a drink” while on his way to the sheriff department’s impound lot.

The 19-year-old Yemeni gangsta-jihadi gas station operator profiled in one of my previous articles, Ali Alsanai, takes pictures of the victim’s burned car as it sits hitched onto the tow truck in front of the store, then he posts the pics on Facebook, announcing specific details about how the victim was killed — that she had an accelerant poured down her throat and in her nostrils, and was set on fire.

…the crime scene and the victim’s burned-out car and had been formally processed for evidence in less than an hour??

As if to add insult to incredulity, Champion is caught in a blatant lie in the same interview, at the hyperlink. At the 10:37 mark, WMC Action News 5’s Michael Clark asks Champion about the CCTV video from the M&M First Stop gas station, where Jessica was recorded buying gas and cigarettes within two hours of her being set on fire only a couple of miles away. There has been scandalous (and reasonable, based on specific details) speculation that police never even knew or bothered to inquire about the existence of the store’s surveillance video until Clark, the reporter, went asking questions at the store, and discovered it days after she was killed.

At the 11:15 mark, Champion absurdly claims that “the actual hard-drive had already been collected” from the surveillance system even before deputies made an alleged return trip to the store to take an alleged closer look at the video. This is a rather obvious impossibility, a lame attempt at face-saving which makes no sense whatsoever. If police had taken the CCTV system’s hard drive away early on, as he states, how in the world would Clark, and deputies, be able to replay and scrutinize portions of video repeatedly at the store in the days which followed?

Bloggers have been pouring over photos and Google street-views of the crime scene itself (and everything else having to do with the case), which was immediately left unsecured after the incident, for weeks now. Some have even traveled to Courtland to examine the spot themselves, seeing as police are not forthcoming with any details about their response that night, or lack thereof.

Dogged amateur sleuths, along with some contributors with formal investigative backgrounds and training, post their findings and exhaustive analyses on TheConservativeTreehouse.com (aka ‘The Last Refuge’), which over the last couple of years has become the cyber-clearinghouse for debunking hoaxes like the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown fiascoes, and now this one. They have observed actual car parts such as a windshield wiper, a whiskey bottle, and other items where Jessica’s car was burned, apparently ignored or overlooked by those calling themselves the official investigators.

Laws in Mississippi against the release of 911 call recordings and other relevant findings in ongoing criminal investigations are more strict than in many other jurisdictions around the country. Be that as it may, we are not even getting answers from law enforcement nor the District Attorney as to whether or not any 911 call was in fact made, or who made it. We have not been told, officially, exactly how the scene was discovered and then reported. Reports that a motorist on Herron Road saw the burning car and called 911 are unconfirmed, and nobody has come forward as a 911 caller.

I don’t have the space here (nor the option, really) to proceed with an even more extensive presentation of the countless other bizarre and aggravating aspects of this caper, but many of you reading this have been following it as closely or even more closely than I have, and don’t need me to do so.

As for the rest of you, if you have the time, inclination, and want to drive yourself obsessively into a dark pit of confusion, intrigue, and frustration, head on over to The ConservativeTreehouse.com. Furthermore, I dare you to just try to follow all the crucial updates and troll-wars about it on Twitter.

Of course, despite our efforts, for now the mainstream media is staying way, far away from this one, because it doesn’t quite fit their chosen narrative. Not yet, anyway. Trust me, some bloggers and Tweeters are grasping desperately to try to make it fit, theorizing about the KKK, bikers, Aryan Brotherhood meth gangs, and even Jessica’s ex-con father as a suspect, the supposed motive being that Jessica was heavily involved with black gang-bangers and the sex and drug trade.

Some are comparing it all to a John Grisham novel. The sordid gang characters and the dirty history of all kinds of documented crime and corruption in Panola County, Mississippi are being brought to the surface in all of the controversy on social media, and it has many of us shaking our heads, even as we bow them towards our folded hands in prayer — prayers for #JusticeforJessica.

Following his service in the United State Air Force, Donald Joy earned a bachelor of science in business administration from SUNY while serving in the army national guard. As a special deputy U.S. marshal, Don was on the protection detail for Attorney General John Ashcroft following the attacks of 9/11. He lives in the D.C. suburbs of Northern Virginia with his wife and son.

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